Fox Sports Preps for Super Bowl XLVIII

EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J.—It might be really
cold in this community outside New York
City, on the evening of Sunday, Feb. 2, with
the possibility of precipitation and wind, for
Super Bowl XLVIII.

But you know that.

Any football fan with an appreciation
of history remembers the 1967
NFL Championship, or the “Ice Bowl,” in
Green Bay, Wis., and temperatures that
plummeted to –13 on the famed Frozen
Tundra of Lambeau Field; the 1982 AFC
Championship in Cincinnati, aka the
“Freezer Bowl,” with temps around –9;
and the more recent Giants-Packers NFC
Championship in 2008, at –1.

Those storied games were played as
scheduled, but that’s the kind of deep
freeze that most involved are concerned
about. But when talk of a potential postponement
arises, some of those people
point out that the weather that night might
be unseasonably mild. There’s so much
chatter about it that there are web sites
like www.biggameweather.com, from Rutgers
University, and AccuWeather’s www.willitsnow.com, devoted to the topic.

But this is the Super Bowl, and that
means gazillions of eyeballs glued to
screens large and small, so it’ll most likely
start on cue.

With that seemingly constant discussion
acknowledged, know that Fox Sports
is bracing for the moods of Mother Nature,
a faulty power setup and the game, too.

That starts with an on-field, glass enclosed
pre-game show set that lowers
down before splitting in half against the
wall, and the usual tripling of the number
of cameras that will be available to acquire
those game-changing shots.

ACTIONS/REACTIONS
What that means, said
Lead Director Rich Russo,
is that Fox Sports will
probably have 45 to 50
cameras on hand. “We use
about 15 to 18 during the
regular season, then ramp
it up to about low 20s during
the playoffs,” he said.

That mix will include
about 35 regular cameras—
mostly Sonys—with
more on the sidelines and
in the end zone. But Russo,
who will be directing his
second Super Bowl, said
that the approximately four dozen cameras
will be used “smartly and economically,”
with a number of robotic models in
the mix.

What Fox Sports will offer, he said, is basically
its regular setup, and will include—
with four low end zone cameras—all super
slo-mos, plus five or six handhelds for
the rovers, including a couple more super
slo-mos.

Rich Russo, director, Super Bowl XLVIII for Fox
Sports

That effort comes down to capturing
emotions. “We want to be able to capture
the reactions of the players and the intricacies
of the game, on the ball and off the
ball,” Russo said, “though that can be a challenge,
due to the players wearing helmets.”

Using the more sophisticated lenses of
today is also part of emotionally connecting
with the viewers. “Back in the ’80s, if
you had a 55:1 lens, you were happy,” he
said. “Now, they’re 86:1 or 100:1.”

With the super slo-mos, Fox Sports will
also employ three “X-mo”s, as opposed to
just one per game during the season. The
Vision Research X-mo came to the fore
after the famous “helmet” catch by David
Tyree of the New York Giants toward the
end of Super Bowl XLII, when the Giants
upset the New England Patriots in Glendale,
Ariz. (which was also covered by Fox).

WHAT'S NEW
What’s new with this year’s broadcast,
said Russo, is six 4K hybrid cameras, which
enable shooters to zoom in on images and
heighten the potential for definitive looks.
Fox used one per game during the regular
season, noting that they “helped us tremendously,
notably on calls by the officials.”
They will be used on both sidelines, on
both goal lines and on both end lines.

That’s all part of bringing new angles
to the game’s storyline. “The live cameras
and the replays tell the story,” and part of
doing that is having the right people and
the right cameras, Russo said. “We don’t
want any breakdowns. We have to operate
as a team [of more than 200
people, in this case], just like
the players do.”

Jerry Steinberg, senior vice president of field
operations and engineering for Fox Sports

On the audio side, in the
past Fox has mic-ed a player
or two and played the content
back live, such as when
mic-ing the center/guards to
hear the quarterback’s signals,
instructions, etc. “We
may try to do that, depending
on what teams are playing,”
he said, noting a game
time decision.

Another decision will
be made regarding how
many parabolic mics to use,
though Russo did offer that
it will be more than “the four to six” that
are employed during the Fox regular season
broadcasts.

What broadcasting the Super Bowl
comes down to is basically “adding more
of the same of what we use every week,”
said Jerry Steinberg, senior vice president
of field operations and engineering for
Fox Sports. And while he also offered that
there will be some intriguing technical approaches,
most were still under wraps at
press time.

What Steinberg did say is that the broadcast
will offer player tracking (the little
bubbles on a player’s head at the line of
scrimmage) via a ChyronHego. Other enhancements
will include enhanced graphics
in the “tackle box” (where the quarterback
stands, inside the tackles).

The truck on hand will be from Game
Creek Video (which did not respond to
a request for an interview at press time),
which works with Fox during the regular
season. The truck contains up to six Sony
4K cameras and more than 20 EVSs. “This
will be the third Super Bowl we’ve done
with Game Creek, after Glendale [XLII]
and Dallas [XLV],” Steinberg said. “That’s a
testimony to how they design equipment
and how it’s still current. In fact, it’s called
the ‘Fox truck.’ The 4K cameras will allow
us to extract 720p, so we can zoom in tight
on the action.”

Of course, using more equipment
means that more may fail, but Fox will
have backups on hand, Steinberg said. But,
as Russo also noted, it’s not all about the
equipment.

“We can replace a camera in five minutes,
but we can’t replace talent. It’s really
important that we take care of our people.
They have to be kept safe and warm,” Steinberg
said, noting that working during the
Giants-Packers NFC title game in 2008
“was the coldest I’ve ever been.”

Fox Sports will erect a
43-foot-high set at Times
Square as part of its
Super Bowl XLVIII
coverage.

Speaking of backups, know that contingencies
will be in place after last year’s
major power malfunction at the Mercedes-
Benz Superdome in New Orleans during
Super Bowl XLVII, between Baltimore and
San Francisco. There “are many redundancies
in place,” Steinberg said.

BRING IT
All told, while the champions of each
conference are being determined, the
crew at Fox is bracing for Feb. 2. “Our people
will be setting up all of the previous
week, but once the teams come out of the
tunnels, their adrenaline will kick in,” Russo said, “and ours will, too.

“Everyone will be talking about the
weather, but we’ve dealt with the elements
plenty of times,” he said. “I’d like to see a
little snow. It makes for great pictures.”

Steinberg is on board and getting ready,
too.

“We’ll be ready for 60 degrees and we’ll
be ready for a blizzard,” he said. “That’s kind
of neat, because some of the most classic
games have been outdoors. And Super
Bowl XLVIII could be one of them.”